SUPER NOTICIA FM RELIES ON CONEXIA INTERCOM AS ITS GLOBAL AUDIO PLATFORM 18-10-2018
Technical engineers from Super Noticia and AEQ in Control Room of the Brazilian radio.
The same IP intercom matrix with Dante protocol provided by KROMA by AEQ performs contribution and broadcast audio exchanges between external services, central control and studios at several buildings using Yamaha and Axia consoles by means of AES 67 standard.
By Carlos Penido, Technical Manager at Super Noticia
Super Noticia’s Technical Manager, Carlos Penido, in the Control Room of the Brazilian radio.
Super Noticia FM is a Brazilian radio station based in Belo Horizonte, covering the state of Minas Gerais in the 91.7 FM band using a central 30KW transmitter. It is part of the important editorial group Sempre Editora, which is also the owner of two newspapers.
AEQ’s largest-capacity Intercom System CONEXIA has been selected to cover the intercom needs of all work areas in the station, as on the same platform Super Noticia obtains a professional audio router with broadcast quality (20 Hz to 20KHz and 24bits depth) and a complete Intercom system. As mentioned, all is integrated in the same platform and shares common hardware, what simplifies operation and maintenance, allowing for a complete flexibility in the system’s final configuration, making it fully adaptable to the particular needs of the station, at every moment.
The station has studios in three locations within the same city, three controls in the main location (namely, Central, B and ON AIR), a studio at Independencia and another one in Mineirao Stadium, linked by long-distance fiber optics. The technical challenge was to install intercom and exchange audio between all the studios.
The central router consists on a pair of Conexia TM 8000 controllers and an AEQ BC2000D matrix chassis including redundant power supply and controller modules, as well as two backup DSPs, three Dante Audio over IP cards and several other analog and digital input/output cards for local services within the control room. The complete system has 240 ports that may be used both for Intercom services (using Dante IP protocol) or central audio routing using AES 67 standard, with the most varied audio formats: analog, AES or SPDIF digital, and even AoIP using DANTE operating in AES-67 mode against Livewire+ (also operating in AES 67 mode).
BC 2000 Real Time Control
Services have been organized around an AoIP card in the matrix -operating in Dante mode- for Intercom, another one -also operating in Dante mode- connected to 8 PC lines running Dante Virtual Soundcard and to 40 lines against a Yamaha Console (that is also able to operate in AES 67 mode according to our tests). Finally, the third card –which operates in AES 67 mode- connects 8 stereo input / output lines to each Axia mixing console -using Livewire+ in AES 67 mode.
A 16-key intercom panel is present at each studio, configured to operate both as IFB and coordination. The panels are routed to a bank of 10 audiocodecs for coordination with external services.
A PC workstation running AEQ RTC software has been installed in the Central Control for the remote control of the audio platform, as well as another one with an AEQ NCB100 dedicated keyboard. Even an AEQ AM03v2 confidence monitor has been provided for local audio supervision tasks.
Everson Franco, technical Manager in charge of the Super Noticia project using the TP8000 KROMA by AEQ intercom panel.
The complete project has been coordinated by our Technical Teams at Radio Super Noticias, in tight collaboration with AEQ technical staff, that moved to our installations in order to configure and start-up the system. We acknowledge their dedication, key to be able to successfully finish the project. But I also want to highlight the collaboration of the Yamaha and Axia local technical services who implemented the part of AES 67 standard configuration in their devices required to become compatible with the router provided by AEQ, overcoming the difficulties related to the adjustment of latency as a function of the distance between the remote consoles and central router. To our knowledge, it is not common to find AES 67 integrations like this with different protocols to date.
